AP article on Black/African-American split

[Victor Steinbok]

I tried to trim it down to relevant bits. Of course, you can see the
whole thing at the link.

VS-)

http://goo.gl/ATWrk
Some blacks insist: 'I'm not African-American'. By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP.
SF Chronicle. February 4, 2012

> The labels used to describe Americans of African descent mark the
> movement of a people from the slave house to the White House. Today,
> many are resisting this progression by holding on to a name from the
> past: "black."
> ...
> "I don't like African-American. It denotes something else to me than
> who I am," said Smith, whose parents are from Mississippi and North
> Carolina.
> ...
> Gibre George, an entrepreneur from Miami, started a Facebook page
> called "Don't Call Me African-American" on a whim. It now has about
> 300 "likes."
> ...
> "It just doesn't sit well with a younger generation of black people,"
> continued George, who is 38. "Africa was a long time ago. Are we
> always going to be tethered to Africa? Spiritually I'm American. When
> the war starts, I'm fighting for America."
> Joan Morgan, a writer born in Jamaica who moved to New York City as a
> girl, remembers the first time she publicly corrected someone about
> the term: at a book signing, when she was introduced as
> African-American and her family members in the front rows were
> appalled and hurt.
> ...
> Morgan, a longtime U.S. citizen ... calls herself Black-Caribbean
> American. (Some insist Black should be capitalized.)
> ...
> The word black also was given many pejorative connotations — a black
> mood, a blackened reputation, a black heart. "Colored" seemed better,
> until the civil rights movement insisted on Negro, with a capital N.
> Then, in the 1960s, "black" came back — as an expression of pride, a
> strategy to defy oppression.
> "Every time black had been mentioned since slavery, it was bad," says
> Mary Frances Berry, a University of Pennsylvania history professor and
> former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Reclaiming the
> word "was a grass-roots move, and it was oppositional. It was like,
> `In your face.'"
> Afro-American was briefly in vogue in the 1970s, and lingers today in
> the names of some newspapers and university departments. But it was
> soon overshadowed by African-American, which first sprouted among the
> black intelligentsia.
> The Rev. Jesse Jackson is widely credited with taking African-American
> mainstream in 1988, before his second presidential run.
> ...
> Jackson, who at the time may have been the most-quoted black man in
> America, followed through with the plan.
> "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base,
> some historical, cultural base," Jackson told reporters at the time.
> "African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

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